Stateside with Rosalea Barker: Hacked off

Hacked off

by Rosalea BarkerJuly
15, 2012

If you wonder why I haven’t been
writing much lately, it’s because I can’t decide between
a surfeit of things to write about, not because of a lack of
them. Even trying to list some of the topics makes my brain
weary, so I won’t. Instead I’ll opt for today’s
bizarre interaction with a techie at the cellphone company
that controls my access to Gmail pushed to my Blackberry
phone.

At 8:17am last Thursday, I got a Blackberry email
saying that I had to re-validate the password for my Gmail
account. That’s because Gmail had invalidated it because
they’d seen suspicious activity. That’s because, once
upon a time, so long ago that I can’t even remember doing
it, I signed up as a contributor to Associated Content. In
2010, that company was bought out by Yahoo! and the
unencrypted file containing contributors’ details was
posted on the Internet last week. You might have read about it.

The incensed story
linked to above was published on Friday, July 13 at 5:54pm.
Coincidence or not, Yahoo! finally sent me an email at
6:59pm that evening saying “This message is being sent to
an email address in this compromised file.” Furthermore,
“As a non-Yahoo! account holder, we apologize that we
cannot provide you a direct means to secure your account.”
I know this because I looked at my email on a computer, not
being able to access it on my smartphone. Note that it took
two days for Yahoo! to contact me.

In order to restore the
email push to Blackberry, I had to go into the settings on
my phone and enter my user name and password. Turns out, I
have not got a clue what my user name is. And you can’t
reset that information except on your phone, so the Internet
help page sent me to a 1-800 number, and that led me to the
conversation with the tech at the cellphone company.

I
asked for my user name. He wouldn’t give it to me, and
instead asked for my email password. Are you kidding me?!
I’m having to go through all this because my password was
compromised by hackers, and now you’re asking me to give
it out over the phone? Well, I didn’t say that. Dumb and
stupid as it may seem, I simply gave him the password, he
reset it, and now I’m back to where things were before.
That is, I will have to reset my password on Gmail and then
call the tech line again and ask for my user name.

I seem
to recall the user name was set up by a salesperson with
whom I’d had a less than friendly encounter, so perhaps I
should just try “DementedOldBat”.

::Google gives me
my due::

Earlier in the week, I received a check from
Google via Gilardi & Co. LLC. It is my share of a 2009
settlement that Google agreed to when some people who
complained that AdWords was ripping them off took out a
class action lawsuit against the company on behalf of all
AdWords account holders. You can go to the website
adwordscustomersettlement.com to read about the $20 million
settlement.

Truth be told, I was completely unaware of
the lawsuit or the settlement—or, if I was aware, had
completely forgotten about it. Not surprising, since it took
three years to reach a payout. And it is in the case documents that you find the reason
for the delay. Back in 2009, one person—and one person
alone—objected to the settlement. Matthew Weiss is, in the
words of those then trying to have the court throw out his
objection, “an attorney and seasoned objector to class
action settlements” who stood to receive “25% of any
legal fee that is given as a result of our objection and any
enhancements.” (“Our”, in this context is Weiss and
the other two lawyers his law company retained.)
Furthermore, the objectors to Weiss’s objection claimed
that Weiss wasn’t even an AdWords user.

It seems the
case was dragged out because of a “scrivener’s error”.
One of my favorite literary characters is Bartleby the Scrivener, whose job it was
to copy out by hand legal documents. These days, of course,
lawyers are their own scriveners, and it was Weiss’s own
mistake that he named himself instead of his law company as
the aggrieved party. Then he tried to rectify the
“mistake” and that led to more appeals and
counter-appeals, dragging out the settlement, which remained
unchanged.

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